I'm going to make an unpopular confession: I love birthright citizenship. Yes, I've heard the stories that America just adopted it to get around the Dred Scott ruling, which held that black people could not be citizens of the US. I don't know if that's true. But I still love the idea: a child born in America is automatically a citizen of America. This prevents us from having a permanent class of "guest workers", the way they do in Europe and the Middle East.
I'm also not bothered by the fact that some women from other countries, ranging from the Latin American countries to China, visit the U.S. just to give birth. For all of the discussion of "anchor babies" that you hear, you'd think that having a child born in the U.S. confers an automatic right to stay to the parents. But it does not, as anyone who actually cared (a group apparently not including either President Trump or President Obama) would know. It seems to me that the bigger problem isn't the child being born here and having the option to come here at 18, but rather the lack of attention paid to visa-overstayers and other U.S. residents who do not have legal residency in the U.S. (and generally aren't even trying to get it).
I'm bringing up this point for two reasons: 1) there is a movement to eliminate birthright citizenship, which seems un-American to me (and hopefully continues to fail to gain more traction); and 2) Chinese citizens have found a new way to gain birthright citizenship for their newborn babies, by visiting the resort of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands. A Wall St. Journal article today (Dec. 22, 2017) discusses this trend, because Chinese citizens can go to Saipan (a gambling haven, which generates 70+% of its income from tourism) without a visa, and as the Northern Mariana Islands are a U.S. territory, babies born there acquire U.S. birthright citizenship. Births to Chinese citizens in Saipan have grown from 8 in 2009 to 472 in 2016.
Obviously, the U.S. couldn't accommodate all of China. But 500 babies -- or even 1,500 babies -- is a far cry from "all of China". And these tourists can actually afford to pay for the birth, unlike the Americans who would like to switch to socialized medicine, paid for by the government. As I learned from numerous friends in Canada, including doctors, the customer service value of the healthcare service you get in Canada equals the amount you paid for it. There just isn't any incentive to do more than the bare minimum. And I still think it's great that so many people from the rest of the world want their children to have the chance to come here to live.
Maybe we could let the parents of these babies stay in the U.S. by trading them for some of the malcontents currently in the U.S.?
Thursday, December 21, 2017
Saturday, December 16, 2017
Review of old international posts
One thing reading back through my old posts makes clear is that U.S. foreign policy never recovered from its scrambled start during the Obama administration. Egypt did not turn out to be a success story. Ultimately, the U.S. had to support an overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government that was elected after the revolt against the Mubarak government.
Ostensible NATO ally Turkey has become an outsider within NATO for its strong anti-Israeli positions, which have caused continuing rifts between it and the US. Despite Kemal Ataturk's attempts to make certain that Turkey would remain a secular country in the future (the real origin of the term "Deep State", a term which is often falsely applied to the American federal bureaucracy), current Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is trying to remake Turkey into a new Ottoman Empire, which includes some collusion with Russia against NATO -- a situation which Erdoğan has used to portray himself as a Muslim hero against the European infidels.
See, e.g., NATO went "crazy" over Russia deal, says Erdogan
I've made the non-novel argument before in other platforms that "all politics is local", but there are certain leaders (perhaps we should call them "little Napoleons"?) who try to design policies to appeal beyond their own country. Usually such leaders have dictatorial control within their country, so they don't really need to worry about domestic insurrections -- or even domestic opposition.
Two people in that situation are Erdoğan and Russian "president" Vladimir Putin, and they both see themselves as regional leaders at the very least. But the point of this post is to note that the opportunities for regional leadership that these tyrants want to exploit opened up because the U.S. abdicated such leadership roles under Obama. Most of Obama's supporters thought that was a correct decision. The rest of us should feel fortunate that Obama's clique no longer has operating control of the U.S., even if we aren't thrilled about who does.
Ostensible NATO ally Turkey has become an outsider within NATO for its strong anti-Israeli positions, which have caused continuing rifts between it and the US. Despite Kemal Ataturk's attempts to make certain that Turkey would remain a secular country in the future (the real origin of the term "Deep State", a term which is often falsely applied to the American federal bureaucracy), current Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is trying to remake Turkey into a new Ottoman Empire, which includes some collusion with Russia against NATO -- a situation which Erdoğan has used to portray himself as a Muslim hero against the European infidels.
See, e.g., NATO went "crazy" over Russia deal, says Erdogan
I've made the non-novel argument before in other platforms that "all politics is local", but there are certain leaders (perhaps we should call them "little Napoleons"?) who try to design policies to appeal beyond their own country. Usually such leaders have dictatorial control within their country, so they don't really need to worry about domestic insurrections -- or even domestic opposition.
Two people in that situation are Erdoğan and Russian "president" Vladimir Putin, and they both see themselves as regional leaders at the very least. But the point of this post is to note that the opportunities for regional leadership that these tyrants want to exploit opened up because the U.S. abdicated such leadership roles under Obama. Most of Obama's supporters thought that was a correct decision. The rest of us should feel fortunate that Obama's clique no longer has operating control of the U.S., even if we aren't thrilled about who does.
Hello again
As is obvious, this blog has been inactive for six years, since the time when Blogger basically throw the Althouse blog off this platform. But I wouldn't even remember that if I hadn't blogged about it then.
In the interim, I've been more active on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. But each of those platforms are seriously limited in the ability to discuss complex ideas. And, truth be told, there aren't many simple ideas that need public discussion. The current recitation of jargon over net neutrality, with virtually no comprehension of the underlying ideas (pro or con) reminded me of that once again.
At the same time, I heard a very intelligent person try to simplify another complicated issue last week, treating it as if opposition to his position was infantile. As usual, there isn't any simple, 140-character-or-less refutation, because the entire issue can only be discussed that simplistically if you take the view that the other side has nothing to say for it. But, with the possible exception of Donald Trump's inability to tell the truth (which isn't, in and of itself, a political issue), political issues aren't that simplistic.
With that in mind, I decided to restart this blog. At some time, I'll probably discuss events of the past six-and-a-half years. Or I may not. But, whatever I type, I hope will stick around longer than the average social media post. And we'll be back to discuss net neutrality. starting with the amazing growth of fiber-optic networks in the US, shortly.
In the interim, I've been more active on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. But each of those platforms are seriously limited in the ability to discuss complex ideas. And, truth be told, there aren't many simple ideas that need public discussion. The current recitation of jargon over net neutrality, with virtually no comprehension of the underlying ideas (pro or con) reminded me of that once again.
At the same time, I heard a very intelligent person try to simplify another complicated issue last week, treating it as if opposition to his position was infantile. As usual, there isn't any simple, 140-character-or-less refutation, because the entire issue can only be discussed that simplistically if you take the view that the other side has nothing to say for it. But, with the possible exception of Donald Trump's inability to tell the truth (which isn't, in and of itself, a political issue), political issues aren't that simplistic.
With that in mind, I decided to restart this blog. At some time, I'll probably discuss events of the past six-and-a-half years. Or I may not. But, whatever I type, I hope will stick around longer than the average social media post. And we'll be back to discuss net neutrality. starting with the amazing growth of fiber-optic networks in the US, shortly.
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